If you are a naturally a political person, then envisioning the concrete process of change and articulating that in your fiction writing is unavoidable. It is organic. Those of us who actually want a better future must take time to think about what it would look like and how to get there. Otherwise, we won't get there. This practice doesn't make up the totality of our creative work but neither does it diminish it. In America, politically active artists are looked down upon. "That's not art," some say. Most published fiction in this country is passively supportive of the state. It is the kind of artist-to-government relationship that Americans only condemn when it happens in places like the former East Germany.
Initially there was a silence about AIDS, so any expression of the AIDS experience filled a void. Today there is a cacophony of nonsense.
In the early 80's, the mainstream press would not mention AIDS. All of the conversation took place before the commodification of gay culture. When the mainstream press did finally acknowledge the epidemic, they corrupted it by creating false categories like "innocent victims," or women as "vectors of infection." Remember that one? Women as machines that infect men and children, not human beings with AIDS who need services. We learned the hard way that once the discussion was sucked up by the dominant sector, distorting articles and news reports were presented in venues in which community-based gay thinkers and writers had no voice to respond.
This condition is now institutionalized. In fact, it is enforced by a strange spiritual camaraderie between the national glossy gay press and the mainstream media. So you have Bruce Bawer in The Advocate and Andrew Sullivan in the Times. There is no oppositionality here. The gay press has practically ceased to function as an alternative source of opinions and ideas.
Things that drive me crazy: The inability of readers to identify with a lesbian protagonist. Gay magazines with straight people on the cover. The transformation of gays and lesbians from activists to consumers. AIDS kitsch. The impossibility of getting plays with lesbian content produced unless they are written by men. Uncritical embrace of marriage and motherhood (am I the only one left who thinks that the best thing about being a homosexual is that I don't have to get married and have children?). The repeated message that activism is not groovy any more so don't do it. The creation of gay and lesbian shelves in chain bookstores so that our books get removed from Fiction or other normative categories-this separation insists that we are not part of American culture.
Within the gay world the defamation of ACT-UP's legacy is shameful and sickening. There is not one person with AIDS in this country who has not benefited from ACT-UP. Yet the emphasis on money and imitations of heterosexual life can only be sold as gay culture as long as there is an absence of political responsibility. Sophisticated marketing has created an anti-political trend by selling passivity as social currency, assimilation as success, and superficiality as fashion.
When my literary agent died in April, 1995, I had a harsh awakening to the specific pressures currently being put on lesbian writers. As one agent said, "Political books are dead and your career is over. We're going to trash this book you've been writing on McCarthyism, bring in a book doctor. The three of us will come up with a plot and I'll sell it on proposal and make you rich and famous like Susan Isaacs." I guess she expected me to say, "Okay." Most of the others simply told me to "throw in a murder." I think what they meant was that lesbian life is inherently not literary and is only deserving of genre status. Fortunately, I didn't listen to any of them, but it served its purpose of humiliating and dispiriting me... temporarily.
I assume that this is part of the co-optation process that takes place in times of increasing repression. Most people are not original thinkers and often can't figure out what's true in the first place. And in times like these, most people are fearful when they do know what's true, and don't have a great deal of integrity about saying so. There is pressure to cut the politics, to make the lesbian content secondary or coded, all to make straight people more comfortable. There's a new ethos that says the only proper place for gay people is in advertising, as consumers buying products.
It must be that the marketing people, magazine editors, and advertisers trying to cash in on the AIDS buck believe that if they don't niche market Godiva Liqueur to HIV-positive asymptomatic white men right now, the business people will themselves become social pariahs and no one will return their phone calls. And they might be right. They could lose their expense accounts. This is where dignity and ethics come into the picture.
We are in a very tender moment when society is making a transition in its understanding of AIDS from lived experience to packaged image. A fake public homosexuality had been placed dramatically forward in highly commodified expressions in film, television, stage, advertising, and pop music. Homoeroticism and certain kinds of romance are allowed to be insinuated into these frames, but little that is uncomfortable for straight people can be shown. And the one thing that can never be shown is homophobia.
The most authentic expressions of the AIDS crisis are continually forced to the margins, as gay-produced work is increasingly contained by niche marketing. The work that we have done on AIDS has been replaced in the public discourse by a clean version of crisis. Vehicles like Rent, Philadelphia, and other AIDS stories written by straight people portray a world in which heterosexuals have nothing to account for, to reflect on, or to regret in their behavior towards people with AIDS and gays and lesbians in general. The role of government and pharmaceuticals is mythologized within the expectations of the general public, and AIDS is comfortable, cathartic, or over.
I experience this directly when I learned that the Broadway musical Rent contained characters, events, and paradigms directly out of my 1990 novel, People in Trouble. Yet, despite an article in New York magazine thoroughly documenting the textual similarities and circumstantial evidence, I found few people willing to publicly pursue the story. The fear of the power of the billion dollar industry that Rent has become was overwhelming. The one substantial difference between the two works is that People in Trouble is about how personal homophobia becomes societal neglect-that there is a direct relationship between the two. Rent, on the other hand, says that heterosexuals are the heroic center of the AIDS crisis. At stake are issues that go far beyond plagiarism. How is AIDS going to be represented in this society? Is there to be ongoing appropriation of artwork created by gay people about AIDS? What happens when corporate art and individual artists collide? My own personal experience with Rent is consistent with the larger ongoing issues of AIDS marketing, the creation of a fake public homosexuality, and the homogenization of the gay press.
Within these market limits on the expression of ideas, a gay-driven industry has gone from covering PWA's as people to be fought for to people to be sold to. There is a sophisticated system of AIDS consumerism in place in which the HIV-positive are divided into the most precise market shares. There are those who purchase the Home Testing Kit. Some will join the expanding category of HIV-positive asymptomatic. Yes, asymptomatic is now a consumer designation. This group, according to Mulryan/Nash, a gay-owned marketing agency, is the one most likely to liquidate their assets. Once symptomatic, people will spend their money on AIDS products and medication and, if amenable (in this new protease climate), sell their insurance policies to viatical companies. While fake stories about AIDS to make straight people feel good are the most public of narratives, real people with real AIDS are on a consumer pipeline, invisible to straight people, while losing and being denied services.
This is the environment in which we are currently attempting to continue a literature of AIDS, one that is filled with pumped-up distortions, even as the real truths are always in flux and hard to depict. For some crazy and inexplicable reason, I believe that this period of crass hypocrisy and public lying will pass. I hope that again there will be a time of counter-culture, an environment of free thought in this country. And gay people will some day be interested in concerns more meaningful than Absolut Vodka. So, I'm going to take the long view and keep expressing my interest in change as part of my fiction. And I hope you will to. Perhaps, if we all do, this time will pass a little more quickly. Let the backlash begin now.